Requiem for the Butterflies
by Losselen
Summary: They were not reborn as the butterflies, nor did they die of suicide. But they were in love; they were all fragile. Cho x Luna, femslash, sexual contents, darkfic.


_summary_: They were not reborn as the butterflies, nor did they die of suicide. But they were in love; they were all fragile.   
_disclaimer_: I disclaim. All _Harry Potter_ characters belong to J.K. Rowling, Warner Bros. Inc., various publishers.   
_warnings_: Character death, sexual contents, rated-R, femslash, dark ambiance in general. 

**Requiem for the Butterflies**

1. 

There came a day when the wind was calmer than usual and far too biting even for the wintry December. The wind sang a song, she would think silently, a song that scented vaguely of antiquity and wisdom and age—dully shiny and emitting the absolute of breathlessness. Luna carved a wooden, acajou box—with velvet-lined insides just as soft as the grasslands—to keep the fluted song there until someone opens it. And she would whisper that song by her lips as she watched a white piece of silk soaring and flickering on the faraway edge of the sky.

Cho's eyes were loosely met and distracted but her hands were firm and focused. She quickly unfastened Luna's white shirt with sure fingers and carefully brushed some blond strands backwards into the shadow behind Luna. The cool scent of black and sooty ink was rooted in her hair as Luna pressed her nose into that dark mass. It was all that she feared, for this day to come, yet this was all that filled her lusty dreams and forebodings of desire. And it somehow came to be that the depth of water was the byword of all terror, of all things wonderful and frightening.

But she was not afraid, Luna told herself as she clutched slackly, Cho's strong shoulders. She was methodical and slowly unhooked Luna's bra, which left Luna a feeling of vulnerability and exposure. Despite how many odd and wonderful things Luna took pleasure in, this was still frightening, and instinctively dangerous.

Yet Cho was gentle, even if a bit cold, as she cautiously kissed Luna in the faint corner of her mouth and looked at her with thorough eyes as if they had all the time in the world. It certainly felt timeless, all the kisses, all the seamlessly wrought plans of sneaking off together, but somewhere in the far back of their mind, time was running out.

When Cho's fingers had stripped all their clothes, when two girls or women looked at each others' bare bodies in an empty dorm room, Luna was sure that she had finally understood what sex was. No longer mysterious but a driven need, a biological intuition of procreation, something sacred and unsullied. She was not afraid.

Cho's tongue was wet and hot as it pushed against the pulse at Luna's neck, her palms were without pressure as she held her. Cho's mouth trailed down her body, softly, followed by the fingers that met the triangle that she sought.. Deftly they entered and Luna let out muffled noises because it hurt, the way nails dug into her flesh, even though it was made to be entered. They found their rhythm, the two of them, all the time Cho held Luna in a protective gesture as if Luna was some precious and deified treasure that she dared not to mar. Yet Cho has never told anyone of her for reasons both of them could not comprehend. 

They did not say a word, this time or the times after this. And not afterwards either, not a single thing all through the hour of night or day.

So eventually Luna assimilated the hurt of Cho's nails inside her body, which became a natural thing.

2. 

That night in the nearly empty common room, Luna asked Cho to recite her a Chinese poem. "Because," she said after Cho asked why, "I don't know any poems from China." And Cho had smiled sweetly and closed her eyes. Luna did not understand a single word of the poem, though she thought it pleasant and strange and beautiful. She sat and listened to the changing tones of Cho's voice, and imagined what she was saying.

The entirety of Chinese was that of a current — like the tapering of a horse-mane brush — seemingly soft and gentle, but really, if one knew how to, it was rock-hollowing and divine and fiercer than anything else. Embodying the spirit of poetry and the power of music and the darkness of human civilizations. Fluttery and abstract words like the souls of dead poets all ensnared in a glass jar of butterfly lovers.

Luna thought that she loved her, that very moment, not because of what she was saying but because of the serene, fire-lined silhouette of her face, the burning amber of her flame tinted hair. And long into the night, Luna told Cho stories she'd heard as a child, stories of quests and voyages. Glories of men long dead who wore strange jewelries and sang strange songs; folklores and myths that probably never came to be, but hymned in the minds of old men who wished they had been greater; men who forgot the why's and how's and fell prey to dreams. Yet Luna bought into this, to all of this, to all the extraordinary stories of pirates and warriors, to the splendor of exotica and the beauty of charming and brave men. To adventures she turned her ears, and began to loathe reality. She fell in love, more than once, with the swordfighters in legends who bore peculiar scars of mysterious origins, with beaded cloaks and swarthy sashes floating behind them as they marched smirking in their mucked boots.

Cho was none of that. She was sweet and feminine without all the coarseness of seafarers or woodland wanderers—pure and sheer and fine and stronger than steel.

Gradually the glories of the dangerous wonders faded along with memories of their appeal, and Luna forgot all about the drunken songs and clicks of leather boots and feathered hats, all about the strange lands and seas.

On another night, wild and exotic, Cho asked Luna, in front of the embers of the common room, to go outside for a walk. Luna did not refuse, but she thought it strange, since the rain poured down outside and the voices of men were reduced to mere whispers against the thundering and wrathful wind. They had walked down the Ravenclaw Tower, and sat on the cold stone steps, saying nothing and eyeing the flashing lightning.

And there, they kissed there in the storm.

In a sudden moment — not only in that same day but the same hour or minute or perhaps second — in that rustle of treetop leaves and sweep of cold gust and trickle of fallen rain and blaze of smoldering purple — Cho whispered to Luna that she loved her. It was a desperate love, Luna had thought, a clinging love, a hopeless one. One that burned unhurriedly and reservedly like a slow bonfire, but bound to die out in the end when sun dawn and people woken.

Butterfly lovers who twirled around each other and fluttered upwards much like how wind breathed because they wanted to dance on the clouds and dream of their yesterday. Butterfly lovers who traveled far and wide — far too far for the eye to comprehend — and reached every edge of the earth. (_O butterfly lovers._)

3. 

Nights went by and so did the days, and Luna's fifth year passed. Cho was graduating, she realized for the first time.

It was a strange feeling, to be so alone again, and the thought of Cho going into war like the rest of the graduates horrified Luna.

It also horrified Luna, the extents in which human beings can kill, and the sheer sadistic spirit of human nature that fueled it. The ghastly and surreal stories of the two Wars of the Muggles, the pitiful stories of Muggles killing each other by the hundreds and thousands—not just killing but killing through the extremities of human endurance—that the Wizarding World always dismiss as too impossible a thing. But they do not see, Luna thought as she wept silently, the darkness of the human heart, nor their own idiocy that will destroy them.

A cool and whirling rock atop the deep, black lake gathers concentric circles beneath it and Luna dipped her two feet into the cold and wet and silken water. The Lake was calm. Luna was calm. The distant noises of the feast riddled her thoughts, and she was glad of the arrival of summer.

The following day, Cho embraced her tightly and kissed her just before she stepped out of the train, and she was gone.

Luna then, for the very first time, understood that she herself was fragile, more fragile than she ever thought possible.

4. 

Today, reports of the casualties are printed in the _Prophet_. Cho was listed.

Luna thought of the Old Lie as she slumped down into her chair.

Luna thought of the souls of the men of war reborn in as the cemetery birds. Reborn into the soul of a creature of flight that can soar over the poppy-seeded field where their unburied corpses once lied. And she will come back one day, as a war bird, and open that box of windy songs.

"the old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."


End file.
